Xapian 1.4 is over 3 years old now (1.4.0 released 2016-06-24),
and 1.2 has been deprecated in Notmuch version 0.27 (2018-06-13).
Xapian 1.4 supports compaction, field processors and retry locking;
conditionals checking compaction and field processors were removed
but user may want to disable retry locking at configure time so it
is kept.
This change allows queries of the form
thread:{from:me} and thread:{from:jian} and not thread:{from:dave}
This is still somewhat brute-force, but it's a big improvement over
both the shell script solution and the previous proposal [1], because it
does not build the whole thread structure just generate a
query. A further potential optimization is to replace the calls to
notmuch with more specialized Xapian code; in particular it's not
likely that reading all of the message metadata is a win here.
[1]: id:20170820213240.20526-1-david@tethera.net
